Dangerous Men Needed, but Not Wanted

Jesus’ Woe Against the Pharisees and the Problem of Dangerous Men

I'm going to start this sermon with a reading from Matthew 23, starting in verse 32, the Lord says, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.

In this way you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous and say, if we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.

So you bear witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up then the measure of the guilt of your fathers. Harsh words, and you may be wondering why in 1 Samuel 27 that I'm choosing to start with that passage.

I hope to make that clear. A man who has been, from afar, a spiritual father of mine for years now, he is a rough and tumble pastor in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, his name is Matt Truella. He said this week, America's churchmen enthrall the people with the theory of Christianity, but want nothing to do with the practice of Christianity.

We often say that we would like to be dangerous men who attack the enemy, and the reality is that in my life, any man who is deigned to be dangerous in the church has been quickly put in his place, silenced, muzzled, under the guise of, that's not wisdom, and that's not wisdom.

We have men in the pulpits, and I myself have been one of them, that like to stand and beat on our chest and talk about the boldness that we need to have for Christ, and surely we have it, and yet, as a church, we have to look around, and we have to look at what the fruits of the American church have been, and we've caved in on virtually everything.

We've caved in on the welfare state. We've caved in on COVID. We've caved in on abortion. We've caved in on LGBTQ, no-fault divorce, elder qualifications, church discipline, on and on and on and on. And yet, we hear the words of Christ in Matthew 23, and we think, yeah, those Pharisees, they.

Were awful.

What a bunch of bad guys. And as I've read this chapter this week, I have thought to myself, and I've come to face with a few nasty truths, and one of them is this. I was talking to my wife one night, talking about the great reformers, and she asked me in the context of the podcast, like, from a scale of 1 to 10, how feminist do you think.

You are?

I think my answer is a 4 or a 5, because it's fun to imagine ourselves that if we had lived in the 1500s, that we would have stood with Luther, and we would have stood with Knox, and all of the heroes of the faith, even while today, I think that we would throw Martin Luther out of this pulpit.

I think we would church discipline him for the language that he used in his pamphlets, and we would denounce him and have nothing to do with him. And then we wonder why the church seems impotent in the culture.

And the reason why is because we have no dangerous men, because any man who shows any danger, we quickly buckle them down and put them away. What I was confronted with in this text this morning is that I was trying to imagine if David was running for president in the United States, how many churches would be demanding that their people not vote for him.

And the reason why, remember who we're talking about. You can almost hear the language that would come out. I can't vote for a man for president who's committed adultery. I can't vote for a man for president who's acted like a lunatic and who's lied on numerous occasions.

He defames Christ with his actions, right? He's a bad guy. Remember when he acted all crazy in the Philistines, and he was slobbering all over himself? That doesn't look very presidential to me. And I think what we have to be confronted with is that our climate right now is extremely.

Stupid.

We are very, very stupid. Because let's be confronted with this. We have immature thought that thinks that the greatest king in human history, other than the literal son of God, the greatest king in human history, we would be too holy to vote for him.

And I know that I would have to be putting out content about a Christian case for why you're allowed to vote for David. We would have to do something like that. And we think in this chapter, it confronts us with things that make us profoundly uncomfortable sitting here in the American church.

Because the fact of the matter is, we're wrong. We are wrong. David is a great man of God. David is a man of faith. David sins, but he pursues God's will with zealousness and extreme cost to himself. David is a dangerous man.

And the Old Testament and the New Testament confront us with many stories of dangerous men that we would run out of the church today. Let me just give you a few. Samson, he was a fornicator. He also destroyed his enemies by the power of the Holy Spirit.

David, we're going to talk a lot about him today. How about Abraham? Remember that time? Well, remember that two times? That he gave his wife to a pagan king for the harem by saying that Sarah was his sister?

Wow, what a coward. What about Isaiah? Isaiah walked around naked in Israel for three years. Whoa, could he be my pastor? Remember that? That was rough. What about Ezekiel, when he was sitting out on the sidewalk eating unclean bread that he was cooking over human dung?

And we would think, that's not very pastoral. What about some of the other things that Ezekiel said? We would throw him straight out of the church. What about John the Baptist? Not very winsome, John the Baptist, when you go over to religious leaders of the time and you call them a brood of vipers, and he warns them to flee from the wrath that's to come.

He's not talking to the harlots and the thieves. He's talking to the pastors of his day. What about the most dangerous man of all time, whose words I started this sermon with? Could Jesus be our pastor?

I often ask myself that. I often ask, in my current context, if Jesus himself came, would we listen to his words, or would we put him out on the edge as saying, you know what, Jesus, you're really making the lost people pretty mad, and you're not drawing them in.

You need to be a little bit more kind. So do we today, pastors, should we stay out of politics so that we don't give offense? Are we really worried about making people angry? How are we going to win them if they're angry all the time?

And are we willing to be accused of being angry sometimes? Is it okay for men of God to be angry at sin? These are the questions that we have not participated in. In my lifetime, what we do time and time again is we find dangerous young men, and we henpeck them, and we put them on the sideline, and we give them a job like roping off some parking spots until they learn a little bit of wisdom.

And the Bible tells us that young men, their virtue is their strength. I have to ask, is the American church strong? I think we all know the answer, and the reason for this is very obvious. It's because we do not have young men.

But friends, they're coming. Every survey that you read shows that young men are coming back to the church. And what I fear is that we don't know what to do with them. So are we going to keep repeating the same mistakes of our past generations, or are we going to learn a way to embolden the young men?

That's a long introduction, but I think we needed it, because this chapter is a difficult.

One.

I always know it's a good one, because when Brady asked me about benediction verses, and he's like, well, what is this chapter? What's going on in here? That always gives me kind of the blank slate, and I'm happy with it.

But I'm going to start with a little bit of literature, and I think here's what I'm going.

To do.

David’s Second Visit to Gath and the Shrewdness of His Strategy

I'm not going to make qualifications today, but I'm going to say that there are many qualifications that could be made. And some of this stuff you have to tread lightly on, because the nature of 1 Samuel, that a lot of times the author leaves things unsaid that we have to fill in the blanks, and we have to find clues to figure out where he's going in the narrative.

And here's the clue that I'm going to jump on today. Why is David doing this? Why is he here? Here's what I think, and I'm going to bring us through a brief survey. We had a mini episode in 1 Samuel where David's on the run and he's hiding.

It really starts about in chapter 21, and it makes its way all the way to today. And we see a trilogy of David in the cave, cutting off Saul's robe, being repentant about.

It.

And then the next chapter, David doesn't show that same repentance, that same gentleness when he's going to kill Nabal and his whole household. But then at the end of that, God strikes Nabal dead, and this makes a huge impression on David, because in chapter 26, David says this astounding thing.

He says, Yahweh will smite Saul, whether it be by old age or in battle, however it's going to happen, Yahweh will smite him. And then we see David leaving, and it's a curiosity, and people are twisted up about.

This.

I get it. And that's where step lightly, right? Here's what I think, though. I think that David, with this newfound, with this understanding, with this repentance, where he knows God has got Saul, so what am I going to do?

And I think what David does is he becomes zealous for the path of the Lord. And what he does is he leaves the cave to go to a position of strength, very shrewdly, to where he can start clearing out the kingdom.

And that's what he's going to do. So I've entailed this first point, second time's the charm, and we're going to talk about what kind of dangerous man David is, and how we need dangerous men like him, and how we don't want them.

And what I want to do by the end of the sermon is I want to convince you that we should want.

Them.

We should want dangerous men. But when we have dangerous men, it's going to make us feel very uncomfortable. Because dangerous young men are going to say things that make us cringe, okay? And they're going to do things that make us go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, settle down a little bit, okay?

And you can see it. That's what young men do. They're strong, they're impetuous, they get out in front. And that's why Paul gives us a picture in Titus about how old men are supposed to give wisdom and supposed to be venerable.

Older men are supposed to have gravitas so that the younger men respect them, and it can hone off some of the stupidity of youth. We don't want to take their strength away, but we do want to hone in and rein in the stupidity.

What we've done is we've thought young men just are stupidity. And that's a problem, because we've sapped their strength away. And we are reaping the whirlwind as a culture because of it. Second time's the charm.

David is going to go to King Achish again. We read that in verses 1 through 4. I'm going to pick it up and reread so that we can hear it. Repetition is the key to learning. Verse 2, so David arose and crossed over he and the 600 men who were with him to Achish the son of Maok, king of Gath.

And David lived with Achish at Gath, he and his men, each with his household, even David with his two wives, Ahinoam the Jezreelitess and Abigail the Carmelitess, Nabal's wife. And it was told to Saul that David had fled to Gath, so he no longer searched for him.

Then David said to Achish, if now I have found favor in your sight, let them give me a place in one of the cities in the country, that I may live there, for why should your servant live in the royal city with you?

So Achish gave him Ziklag that day, therefore Ziklag has belonged to the kings of Judah to this day. This should recall immediately the first time David did this. Back in chapter 21, David fleeing after the incident with Ahimelech the priest and Doeg's presence, David fled and he went to Gath and they started singing the song in the Philistine courts.

Saul has slain his thousands, David has slain his ten thousands, and David becomes very afraid. He writes a psalm about it. He's terrified because he knows that Achish sees him as a political threat, because Achish thought shrewdly that what was going on was that Saul was sending his best general into his court so that he could gut him from the inside.

And so Achish was going to put a stop to that. So David's way out, his shrewd way out, was to act like a madman and slobber all over himself and draw graffiti on the gates of the city. And because of that, Achish looks at him with disgust and in the Lord's means, David is seen as not being a threat.

Achish instead says, why have you brought this crazy person in here? I don't need any more crazy people around here in Gath. Obviously, Gath was swarming with crazy people, okay? So he didn't need one more, and so David is banished, David leaves.

But this time things are different. And the reason that things are different is because, A, the Lord has willed them to be different, but the Lord has used means. And one of the means is that it is known far and wide now that Saul has been chasing David all over the place, and he's been hiding out.

So this time when David comes to Gath, Achish sees him as a potential ally against Saul, because Achish has kept making incursions into Israel over and over again. The Philistines are trying to take over Israel.

And so when David comes this time, Achish sees him and says, ah, this is the thing I.

Need.

I'm going to push on this division. I'm going to take David, and I'm going to enrich him, because then he'll be my boy. And that's going to be divided loyalties within Israel, because David's going to have some, he's going to have some allegiance.

There's going to be dissidents against Saul, and so I'll invite all of them in the Philistine camp so that Philistines can grow. More power for them, right? So Achish takes him in. And then David is going to start in a chapter, and this is what confounds people.

Because on a surface glance, it looks like David just behaves really badly here, okay? But I think that is a surface glance, and that's something that I do have to deal with. But I want you to look at, what's the result of David's activity in Gath?

The result is that the people of God are enriched over and over and over again. We get it right off the bat. The first thing that happens is David shrewdly goes to the king, and he says, Oh king, why should you suffer to live in the same city with me?

You're far too great for that. Let me and my 600 men and these two wives, would you just give us a little podunk place where we can just be out of your hair? And Achish sees that as a good thing, and so gives them land.

And this land actually becomes ancestral land for the Judahites, and they have it for the rest of their kingship. This becomes land of Israel. So the first thing that happens when David goes to the court is that he enriches Israel's lands and grows their borders.

Without a shot fired, Israel gets bigger, okay? God is with him. And so he carries this on, we see in verse 7, that this situation is going to continue for 16 months. This is a long-term situation where David is living in danger, but a different kind of danger that we've seen him in the last few chapters, because Achish no doubt is an enemy, but Achish is an enemy who thinks that he's a friend because David has dealt very shrewdly, all right?

So that's the first time. The second time's a charm. David now has a base of operation on the fringes of Israel in the south where he can do what he wants to do. So what does David want to do? Well here we go.

Pick it up in verse 8. Now David and his men went up and raided the Geshurites and the Gerzites and the Amalekites, for they were the inhabitants of the land from ancient times. As you come to Shur, even as far as the land of Egypt.

And David struck the land and did not leave a man or woman alive. And he took away the sheep, the cattle, the donkeys, the camels, and the clothing. Then he returned and came to Achish. We hardly know how to deal with this in our day and age, but here's what we have to say unapologetically.

David is doing the work of God. He is a man of God. And so what David does is he remembers in a chapter or in a book where we see Saul constantly forgetting and Saul constantly rebelling against what God has called him to do, that David's first act when he gets some freedom, when he's not running and hiding in caves anymore, David's first act is to pick up the band that Moses had handed down in Deuteronomy.

How many of us would do that? How many of us, when given just a little bit of freedom, would decide, you know what, I'm going to risk life and limb to continue the work that my forefathers started. And I'm going to go out into the French and I'm going to build my army by conquest.

And I'm going to take these 600 men who were deplorables, who were really just kind of defectors from Saul, and I'm going to turn them into a hardened military. And the way I'm going to do that is by making holy war on God's enemies, the people who obstructed the path of the Israelites out of Egypt back in those days, and God remembered it.

And God asked that they be stricken down because of the sin of the Amalekites, because they had stood against God in his purposes. How many of us can say that? And how many of us get uncomfortable when a young man first starts reading the scripture and starts becoming zealous with what he reads and starts understanding, why are we playing this middle of the road game where we're afraid to even talk to people about the gospel?

The gospel just saved my life. And we say, hey, hey bud, here's the thing. You got to get to know them before you give them the gospel. We had to have life on life ministry. And what we do over and over again is we blunt the zealousness out of young men and young people.

But see, David doesn't have anybody to do this here. And we can see shades of it in chapter 23. Remember when David was going to Keilah and he heard their cry come out, that his men in the cave were saying, hey, we don't need to go help them.

Who's going to help us? Our life is in danger. If we go down to Keilah and help them out, then Saul's going to know where we're at and he's going to trap us and kill us. And David consults the Lord and the Lord tells him two times, go to Keilah.

And so David goes to Keilah. And I think that it would be a leap, and this is where I kind of look literally here. What's going on with David? I think David is constantly consulting with the Lord. Remember that he has the priest in his midst, right?

The defector. And so I think David, this time, his men aren't saying anything. In fact, his men are absent in this chapter other than just being with him. And we start to see the shades of a leader, right?

The men don't question David's military prowess anymore because the Lord keeps delivering victory after victory after victory. David is doing the hard work that he had been told that his forefathers had been told to do in Deuteronomy 20.

Verse 16 through 18 of Deuteronomy 20 says, Only in the cities of these people that Yahweh your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes, but you shall devote them to destruction, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as Yahweh your God has commanded you, so that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominations, which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against Yahweh your God.

And we've got this undercurrent. What did Saul do in chapter 15 when he was told to go take out the Amalekites? He spared the king and he spared the livestock for his own enrichment. And this is when the prophet Samuel said the strange thing to him.

He said, your insubordination is as divination, is teraphim, like the household idol that his daughter had in the house when Saul came to get David. And here we see a branching of the ways. What's David doing?

David is listening and he's like, if I'm going to be the king of this land, I need to cleanse this land so that our people would not be involved with the teraphim, because these people are an abomination to the Lord.

And if they stay here, then surely when I take up my own, they will infect our people with their abominations and we will be idolaters. Meanwhile, Saul is falling deeper and deeper into idolatry. Saul is inviting the abomination, because if we could subtitle first Samuel, it would be a king like all the nations.

We've seen that very clearly. Here's the thrust. It's a contrast, right? The people say they want a king like all the other nations have. God gives them exactly that. Saul is a king just like Achish. He's just like Nahash.

He's just like them. He loves his idols. He loves himself and he fights to enrich himself. While David here, look what he does. He goes and he clears out the land and then he brings the spoils to Achish so that he can continue to clean out the land.

He's very shrewd. So David continues the ban imposed by Moses. He is about the work of the Lord to secure his kingdom. And David, David has a king, look, David, David sins. No question. But David is really the one king in all of Israel's history where idolatry is not a thing going on in his kingdom.

David never is idolatrous because David is a man after God's own heart. David loves the Lord. David sins, but he doesn't sin in this way and there's no high places built and the nations around David's kingdom fear him because he is an extremely dangerous man.

Nabal should have known better. Why is his name fool? His name is fool is because he should have seen the danger that David presented when he came through the land and he should have respected it. David is a man that we would be nervous around.

We would be very nervous. See David respects the historic writings of God. And a man, a young man in his power needs to have that tempering, his zealous fire, and that is a respect for the commands of God.

Because if we're zealous just for our own selfishness, we're like Saul. But if we're zealous for the writings of God in the Torah, if we're zealous for the gospel, then we are zealous for righteousness.

And sure, sure, we can go too far, but I would rather people start going too far than not doing anything. And that's what we have today. So let's pick this up. Verse 10, Akish said, where have you made a raid today?

And David said, against the Negev of Judah and against the Negev of the Jeremelites and against the Negev of the Kenites. You remember the Kenites from before? Those were the people of Jethro. They were ancestral allies of Israel.

And David did not leave a man or a woman alive to bring to Gath, saying, lest they tell about us, saying, so has David done and so has been his custom all the time he has lived in the country of the Philistines.

So what's David doing? He's going and wiping out the enemies of God, killing all of them so there can be no report.

Back.

And then when Akish asked, David says that he's making war against his countrymen. And so Akish, in his greed and in his selfishness, starts to think, David has surely ruined all the welcome he's ever had in Israel.

He can never go back. He's my guy. And what a general I have now. I have the general who's greater than Goliath. I have the general who's making me rich. This is going to be great. That's what he's thinking.

And meanwhile, David is thinking, men, we can never leave anyone alive who sees this. They have to all die.

Brutal, very brutal.

And yet in the text, remember over and over again, we have to look at tone. Is the tone towards this text, and this is where it confronts us, is the tone of this text positive towards David or is it rebuking him?

And I think overwhelmingly, the tone is positive because David grows and he's blessed through this action. And he grows himself and his men in battle become more and more fearsome. And he is a general that the region is starting to know about.

You know that as these villages start being destroyed, that there has to be fear among God's ranks or among the pagan's ranks. What is happening out there? I would say he's probably the ghost of the Philistines is what has to be thought.

He's ambushing and killing and these villages just disappear and it's like they never existed. How terrifying it would be to be in the land of Shur in those days. Can you imagine what you would be doing?

And we say, but David, he lied. So what do we do with this? I think we like to have nice and tidy packages for this because the text presents this as being positive action. But he does lie and we can make postulations.

We can say something like, well, he was at war. And that is true. He is at war. We can say things like the greater good was served. That's also true. But I think what makes us uncomfortable is that David was full of zeal for God's law and the people.

He was full of zeal for God's people and he acts with conviction and strength to further the interest of Israel. In other words, David is destroying his enemies. And that makes us profoundly uncomfortable.

Even in our military, we don't love to destroy our enemies. We love to go in and mess them up a little bit and then kind of build them back up. That's what we do. We are uncomfortable with a military general like David.

Very uncomfortable. It breaks our modern norms. And we get uncomfortable text all over Scripture because in the case of Jacob and Esau, remember this, when Isaac is blind and Rebekah hatches a plan with Jacob to go in and put furs on him and take what was his.

Remember, God had promised that Jacob would be the one of inheritance. But Isaac was going to stand against God. And so they hatch a plan. And we do not get a rebuke in Scripture over this deception. And it confuses us.

And we start to feel our pietist bubble begin to pop. What is going on here? So let's try to chart our way through this. And I've given us, I think there's five factual things we can take from this text as we look at what David's doing.

Number one, David is the greatest king of Israel to such an extent that he has promised the throne forever. That's a fact. David is the greatest king in Israel history and his throne lasts forever. Number two, David is a man after God's own heart who would do all of God's will.

We saw that prophecy from Abigail and we see it repeated in Acts 13, 22. That's who David is. Number three, David's top priority is God's people. We see that in chapter 23 with Kelah and we see it today that he's about his country.

Number four, David deceives Achish multiple times and is not reprimanded. That's a fact. We don't get Psalms of repentance. We don't see it anywhere. Then number five, we have a commandment. You guys know this one.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbor. That is the commandment. And so we can see a reality here and it requires wisdom. The reality is that God will never, ever, ever call us to deceive our neighbors.

That's a fact. We're not to lie to one another ever. We're never to do that. We are to be people of the truth. But there are times, there are times when God will convict us to deceive our enemies in order to accomplish his clear direction.

This has to be treated very, very carefully for obvious reasons. But it happens over and over in scripture, over and over. The Hebrew midwives, Rahab and Jericho, here with David, Jacob and Rebecca, over and over again.

We saw it in chapter 16 of verse Samuel where God tells Samuel to say that the reason he's gone down is to make a sacrifice when the real reason he's gone down is to anoint David as king. We see it in chapter 21 where David tells a fib to Himelech the priest and then also acts like a madman with Achish.

And we see it here in 27 that over and over again, these deceptions further God's stated commands and prophecies. And we think to ourselves, this is what we like to do. In our Calvinist defeatist bubble, what we like to think is, well God's way is going to be accomplished no matter what we do.

And there is truth to that, but that's the kind of fatalistic determinism. Because the reality is that God always accomplishes purpose through means. And the means are the way that he has called people to act and the sin that he has ordained his enemies to fall into.

So the question we have to ask is, is this a sin that David is falling into? Or is this a means of conviction that God has given him to further the process? And these verses haunt me in Luke 16. And I think we have totally, totally lost this in American Christianity.

We don't even know what to do with this parable. I remember I preached it several years ago as the parable of the dishonest manager in Luke 16. And my first blush with this parable is, I don't know what this means.

And then as I started to dig further, it's like, actually, it's really clear what this.

Means.

It's, duh, stupid.

This means that it's good to be smart. That's what it means. But for us in our postmodern Christianity, in our nice guy bubble, what we think is, how could Jesus be commending this guy who basically cheats his master?

Because that's what happens. So I want to get to the point, verses 8 and 9 of Luke 16 say, And his master praised the unrighteous steward, because he had acted shrewdly. For the sons of this age are more shrewd in relation to their own kind than the sons of.

Light.

And I say to you, make friends for yourselves from the wealth of unrighteousness, so that when it fails, they will take you into the eternal dwellings. Here's what American Christianity says. To make money is to be an idolater.

To build your kingdom is to build your kingdom on earth, and we all know that Jesus' kingdom is not of this earth. And we also know that to get involved with things with the world is to turn them against.

Us.

And so what we need to do is we need to be as gentle as doves. And what we never get is the counterbalance. Because that verse is not in a vacuum, and the Bible asks us to have wisdom over and over again.

And the wisdom that it gives us is that it says, we are to be as gentle as doves, but we are to be as wise or as cunning as serpents. And in this parable that Jesus tells this manager, he defrauds his boss.

He realizes he's about to get fired, so he starts selling off all the stuff so that he can have the stuff. And Jesus commends this action. And we think, how in the world? Jesus, what are you doing with that?

And the answer is, you guys are going to have to be smart, because the world is going to be against you, and you don't just lay over and show them your throat so that they can cut it. And in American Christianity, what we have done over and over and over and over, can I give more, over again, is we have looked at the enemies in our culture, and we've rolled over to show our belly, hoping that they won't kick us.

So that we can get seats at their tables. Because we can do way more gospel work if we can get in the New York Times. And we can do way more good for the kingdom if they don't hate us. And we really do think that we figured this thing out.

When Jesus said that they will hate you because they hated me first, we think, yeah, that was really nice, Jesus, but we figured out a way to where we can serve you and not be.

Hated.

What an amazing thing that we've done. And Jesus says, build up wealth from unrighteousness, so that the sons of unrighteousness will then be in glory, and they'll welcome you. So what if we work about our jobs, and we're shrewd, and we build up riches, not only to pass down to our next generations, but also to provide gospel work, so that those people that we're with when we're being shrewd, and when we're being dangerous men, that they will see that in us, and they will ask us those questions, and they'll say, I've never met a Christian like you, and we'll say, good, because we're not the dead kind, we're kind of the living kind around here.